The art and engineering of Sega CD Silpheed

LLMs are the product of taking the creative output of countless millions of people and turning it into a statistical model which completely erases the attribution for all that material. They can regurgitate interpolated, plagiarized copies of someone else's code, divorced from its original context, but they are structurally incapable of showing where that code came from, who wrote it, or why.

Using these tools, and using your public profile to contribute to the normalization of these tools, is profoundly disrespectful to the programmers, artists, and writers whose work was strip-mined by megacorporations to build those LLMs. You are prioritizing your personal convenience while enriching bad actors who are bent on obliterating the open web, open-source culture, and the craft of programming. It's dissonant.

Fixed link: https://youtu.be/GBS332N6wig?t=1749

I think a better way to put it is that Fabien's blog is an inspiration to anyone looking to understand computers and programming in detail while taking a history tour of old games and systems. He personally has the skill to do so and then present the interesting bits of the system in a very compelling narrative. It gives people someone/thing to look up to. To find out that part of the analysis/output was produced by an LLM crunching through the code base is a major disappointment since it removes or diminishes the human element of the work.

It is fun in a totally different way than programming is. The "fun" or "joy" isn't coming from the sense of accomplishment of writing code or building software per se. Now it feels like it is just the joy of being able to prototype or debug or reverse engineer literally anything at a pace way beyond what you could've ever hoped to before. Have you ever dreamed of developing some software, but realized it was simply too big of a scope for one person? It might not be, anymore, even if you don't go full vibecoder.

The only real problem I ever had with this was the quality of the code. Sometimes it doesn't matter, like for pure prototypes or even reverse engineering, but sometimes it does. My heart sank a bit when I tried Fable to find that it was much better at long tasks and more ambitious in general, but I still didn't like the code much more than Opus 4.7 or 4.8. However, I'm pretty pleased with the code quality of GPT 5.6 Sol. This is a silly thing to care about but I love that by default it doesn't print code comments like a CVS receipt printer adding all kinds of pointless crap that is either apparent from context or irrelevant outside of the conversation you were having. Generally I've also found it to be super good at debugging, usually able to zero in on the actual problem with surprisingly little effort, even with not much context; I wish my debugging foo was that good. I gave Codex a spare machine to test something with real hardware and it has done a fantastic job making use of it.

Then of course there's the problem that I really don't like OpenAI or Anthropic very much. But it seems the news is good there too: even if we assume open weight Chinese models are at least less than 12 months behind on coding performance, then by next year we should have quite a lot of options for how to go about things. Evidence suggests 12 months is probably an over-estimation, and even now I use GLM 5.2 quite a lot at work since it is simply good enough. So... we're getting there too.

Obviously it's a little scary to think the world may need fewer programmers when you are one, and this is maybe not the way that I wanted programming to become accessible and democratized, but beggars can't be choosers. If the future is me being able to run an army of virtual programmers on a GPU cluster, I am interested in seeing what cool shit can be done with it. And when the hype and doom cycle finally ends, I hope everyone else will realize how fucking cool it is, too.